Ed Askew, Cult Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 84

Ed Askew, the singer-songwriter and visual artist whose beguiling acid folk records became cult artifacts unearthed by successive generations of crate-diggers, died of natural causes on January 4. Tin Angel Records shared the news on Instagram, and Askew’s friend and collaborator Jay Pluck confirmed it in an email to Pitchfork. Askew was 84 years old.

Born in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1940, Askew learned piano as a teenager before taking up the guitar. He moved to New Haven to study painting at Yale, where he became fascinated with Paul Cézanne and the modernists. “The issue of innovation never interested me personally, since I believe it may lead to a place where people don’t paint anymore,” he told The Believer in 2012. After his studies, he continued to make art and perform music—in a band called Gandalf & the Motorpickle—in between jobs as an art teacher and house painter.

In the late 1960s, Askew spent a few months living, reciting poetry, and occasionally playing songs in New York. Around the same time, he made his first two records as a solo artist—a pair of cosmic folk albums called Ask the Unicorn and Little Eyes, for the New York jazz label ESP-Disk. The former became a cult curio; the latter remained unreleased until 2002. Between the two, Askew paused his recording practice from the late 1960s until the mid-1980s, around the time he moved back to New York. He self-released hundreds of songs on cassettes that he often mailed to friends, collecting them decades later on his Bandcamp page.

The Little Eyes release attracted a wider audience and, encouraged first by the De Stijl record label, then by others including OSR Tapes, Askew began reissuing music on a more consistent schedule, as well as bringing his hallowed live show to tours with the likes of Bill Callahan and the Black Swans. He finally returned to the studio, in 2013, with For the World, his first new album since the 1960s. Released on Tin Angel, it featured collaborations with Sharon Van Etten, Mary Lattimore, Marc Ribot, and the Black Swans, among others. After a string of further solo albums and collaborations, his final album of his lifetime, released in 2021, was Sleeping With Angels. Two more are in the works, as Jay Pluck wrote to Pitchfork: one produced by the Black Swans’ Jerry DeCicca, and another, recorded live-to-track, called Woodbine Street, with guests including Joanna Sternberg.